Yes, it’s Latin—with a wide spectrum of shades. Wendell Berry speaks of the need to find a vernacular when we speak or write, the duty to use those references and habits of thought so that we are intelligible to our neighbors and, more particularly, to ourselves. Berry came upon this in the poetry of William Carlos Williams, a doctor and denizen of Rutherford, New Jersey. In what he calls “The Struggle Toward a Credible Language”, he details the challenge of speaking from where we are. And while Rutherford, New Jersey was a far cry from his own pioneering roots in rural Kentucky (we simply cannot picture Berry sporting a bow tie like Williams), the need was the same: as Edgar notes in the deep shadows of Lear’s death, we must “speak what we feel”; feeling comes from our particular present, not our sense of decorum.”
The vernacular gives voice to innumerable years of place and our sense of being rooted in it. With our mobility and speed, we easily adopt a global, polyglot perspective, and there are good reasons to do this—we lengthen our reach, we bring the far-flung into our orbit, or enter a world others have made. But as our own William Stafford warned,
“If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.”
Honoring the vernacular led Hopkins to favour words sprung from Anglo-Saxon soil over more Latinate constructions—a feature of his poetry that drives students to distraction and the rest of us to the Oxford English Dictionary. But at the same time it taps into strong, if obscure, currents of our identity. Like a well or spring, language draws from a deeper source, responds to forces we ignore or dispraise at considerable peril—Stafford ends his poem:
“the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.”
So. What signals do we give to this place that itself gives us voice? Are they clear? Even a distinct maybe is far better if it’s honestly felt than a false yes or an uncertain no. Our signals are not confirmed to the verbal—they are seen in the way we scan this particular horizon, in the way we adapt our lives to the place that matters in the most immediate sense. Hopkins witnessed (as did his contemporaries—like Hardy, who made no secret of his dismay) over the coming age of machines and the rending of the earth that seemed to bear the brunt of iron, and sought solace in the unquenchable rejuvenation of creation despite our inroads.
“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. . .”
Yet we have made much further inroads than he could have imagined, inroads that intensify even now, as if to seal up the voice of the place and its vernacular. I doubt even Hopkins could imagine a time when the ‘dearest freshness deep down things’ could ever pack it in and call it quits—that was not consistent with his faith in Providence. But we cannot easily accept, given what we know about our ability to transform our place, this assurance. For those of us living in this time of radical—even global—change, the darkness around us is deep.
What these witnesses share is a concern for who we are and how we see ourselves. Shorn of the fir-clad hills and the oak savannas, absent the returning salmon and the red berries of fall hawthorns, how will we speak our vernacular? Will we adopt some meta-language—without reference to place, without location, without a sense of where we speak? Will it matter that we stand beside the Willamette looking over fields of ryegrass and stands of alder, working lands as well as back-channels of the river? It seems our duty now is preserve our vernacular for those yet to learn the language lest we ourselves fade before our time.
